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252 ILLUSTRATED WORLD
A GROUP OF FISHES DREDGED FROM THE DEPTHS
These queer creatures, owned by the American Museum of Natural History, live from one hundred to two thousand feet
below sea level. They vary in appearance from long, narrow, eel-shaped creatures to those having whale-like heads.
A mixed school of these monsters appearing in New York harbor would be likely to cause as much alarm as a flotilla oi
hostile submarines.
demonstrated on many deep-sea expeditions,
where fishes have been brought to
the surface from profound depths and
placed in water. They were then seen to
flash lights from the ends of their tentacles
or the phosphorescent pores, precisely
as we could well expect from a
careful study of these organs. Major
Alcock makes mention of this strange
phenomenon in his interesting book, "A
Naturalist in Indian Seas", and relates
of a specimen brought up from a great
depth, which "glimmered like a ghost as
it lay dead at the bottom of a pail of
turbulent sea-water". There can be no
doubt that the light given off at the surface
is no measure of that produced
under normal conditions at the bottom of
the ocean. At great depths one of these
fishes undoubtedly gives off an effulgence
that makes visible to the finny
denizens a large area of the sea bottom.
This absence of sunlight has brought
about still another most important consequence.
It being a well established
fact that no vegetable life can exist under
conditions of darkness, there is to be
found, therefore, no plant life of any
form in the abysmal depths of the sea.
In consequence, all of the deep-sea fishes
are carnivorous, the more powerful
species preying upon the weaker. The
idealist who writes of the eternal beauties
of nature might well turn his attention to
some of its less gentle phases, for in this
never ceasing conflict, the "survival of
the fittest" is encountered in its most
terrible form, and deepest significance.
In these somber depths, the world is
cold and black indeed, and might rules
supreme,